How to build an online store using Wordpress Picking a domain and hosting your domain

Step 1 Decide What You want to market! The first step is deciding what you want to market! Small segments of the entire market (the internet) is referred to as a niche. A niche within a niche is a sub niche and a specific area of interest is a micro niche. Health is a niche, skin care a sub niche and acne is a micro niche within the health niche. Health is considered a broad niche and is very competitive but, if you concentrate on a micro niche, your chance of succeeding is much greater. Let us say you love fishing which is in the recreation niche and is a very broad niche and fishing is a sub niche. If you are passionate about fly fishing, this is a micro niche. The easiest place to start is your area of expertise or passion! Choosing a niche that you are interested in will make marketing allot more enjoyable. Research that niche to see if there is interest by consumers and it is profitable. Use some common sense to start. Is this a “hobby” niche? Are you looking to make “hobby” money or make it big? You can use this site to research niches and micro niches http://www.dmoz.org/ Don’t over think your niche because you really just need to get started. You can choose a different niche as you go along!

Step 2 Buy a domain You have chosen your micro niche, now you need a domain. These are general guidelines only. You can spend days upon days researching a good domain name. Here are some pointers to help you but, again, don’t get too lost in this process or hire an SEO expert to help you. Your domain name has to indicate what you are marketing, be as specific as possible and have keywords, relating to what you are promoting, within the domain name. What? Keywords are words (strung together) that people use while looking for information on the internet. Internet marketing is based on keywords. There are several tools that are available; some paid and some free. Keyword spy is both free and paid. You can access it here!

More about choosing your domain I am going to use stock images as my example. Login into keyword spy and type in the key words that you think would suit your niche. I typed in stock photos:

See the search volume is over 1 Million searches per month These are related search terms

If I use keyword spy to search for “like stock photos”, it shows that no one searches those particular words

This means that you don’t want the domain likestockphotos.com but stockphotos.com (or other extensions) would be awesome! However, even without looking, I know it won’t be available because it has so many searches monthly. A domain with keywords that have allot of monthly searches will be taken. However, another place to look http://www.expireddomains.net/ which sells domains that were previously registered but have expired.

No one searches that term

If you are going to market in a specific niche and you are going to rely on SEO, this is an important step of the process of selecting a domain name. Exact match domains (EMD) aren’t as important as they once were but the right keywords will help you succeed.

Another tool is google keyword planner. Go to https://adwords.google.com , set up an account, login and go to tools, then keyword planner., search for new keyword and ad group ideas. This tool is designed for google ad words advertising so , although it is a good tool, it isn’t the best tool if you will performing allot keyword researches. A powerful tool for in depth research, not only for keyword research, but for page ranking is http://www.marketsamurai.com/. It is a paid product but well worth the price you may. Login to market samurai, create a new project.

Enter your keyword and The software automatically populates your title and file. If your site is for local business, choose your country and click create

On the next screen, scroll over to keyword research, you will be asked to enter your adwords account information. If you don’t have an adwords account, set one up. Google adwords account and it will walk you through the process.

Click on generate keywords This will take a few minutes

Once the software returns the keywords, click the analyze keywords at the bottom of the screen. Market Samurai has amazing tutorials on how to use their software.

SEO is essential to online marketing so become comfortable with it but don’t make it a full time career unless you want to become an SEO expert. Again, when you are first starting online, do your best or hire an SEO consultant to help you.

The most important step you can take is to START!

Step 3 You need hosting! There are lots of hosting companies with several different plans. I have used a few on them in my internet marketing career but I find that hostgator is the best. You can get your hosting here! Hosting accounts can look ominous at first but they get easier to navigate with time. When you purchase hosting, the hosting company will send you an e-mail that looks something like this: Hello Your name, Thank you for your order with HostGator! You can log into your billing account at http://gbclient.hostgator.com/login, using the email address we sent this email to, and the password xxxxxxxxx Shared Plan: your plan description Your Control Panel: your control panel web address Username: your user name Domain: your domain Password: your password 1st Nameserver: nsXXX.hostgator.com (the XXX will be numbers) 2nd Nameserver: nsXXX.hostgator.com (the XXX will be numbers) Server IP: 111.111.111.111 (yours will have specific numbers)

This will be your login address to your control panel (where you manage your website) Your login name password

Keep this e-mail safe! Let’s login to the control panel and take a look around:

This is the top portion of your account. The three most import tabs are the: Live Chat Tab

E-mail Accounts Tab Forwarders Tab

Let’s look at these individually Live Chat. Click live chat and a window opens up

Enter your name, select which department you would like, enter your domain, tick that you are an existing customer and enter your question in the what do you want to discuss box. The next window will ask for your billing information, to verify that you own the domain. Hostgator’s support is very good. They let you know how long you will have to wait and a bell rings when they answer you.

E-mail accounts This is where you set up an e-mail account that is attached to your domain. It will be like this [email protected]. You choose the user name. You can have several e-mail accounts associated with your domain. Click e-mail accounts

Choose a user name and the domain name it is associated with. Your e-mail accounts will be listed here and you can use the drop down box to access your e-mail account

E-mail Forwarders E-mail forwarders allow you to send e-mails from all of your e-mail accounts to one e-mail account. This is important; especially if you are new to internet marketing because organization is extremely important. You don’t want to waste time logging into several e-mail accounts.

Click e-mail forwarders

Click add forwarder And input an e-mail address to forward all of your e-mails to.